Three times
by Backgroundnoise
Summary: The three times that the Pie-Maker almost killed Charlotte Charles.


**Disclaimer**: I know that I don't own Pushing Daisies or Lee Pace… But I can dream.

**Rating:** R, to be safe

**Summary**:The rules seemed simple and clear. First touch: Life. Second touch: Dead, again, forever.

**Paring:** Ned/Chuck

**Spoilers:** Everything until Corpsicle is fair game.

Dedicated to my darling Beta darling; thank you for making it possible.

**Title**: The three times that the Pie-Maker almost killed Charlotte Charles.

By Lylou

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"_-So, __a kiss is out of the question?"_

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The rules seemed simple and clear.

First touch: Life.

Second touch: Dead, again, forever.

Actually, after his mother died (twice), and except for some embarrassing, uncomfortable and maybe illegal things, Ned had lived more or less fine according to those two inflexible and established rules in his inflexible and established life.

But sometimes, all that inflexibility and sticking-to-the-rules went out the window along with Ned's self-control, sanity and precaution.

Because, although the rules were clear and more than familiar to him, and even with the constant fear that a second touch, accidentally or fueled by passion, would be the death of the woman he loved, sometimes the rules seemed dangerously more breakable and weak to Ned.

In fact, the rules and their reality were like a rubber band that stretched more and more everyday, so much that sometimes Ned was afraid of what would happen if one of them would let the band go without notice. He thought especially of this when he smelled her honey scent, intoxicating the air around him, every time her hair fluttered dangerously near him.

The facts were these:

One.

The first time that Ned's self control weakened and left him in a hot rush of love, passion and a million things more that he didn't know he had before Charlotte Charles, was only one week after brought her back to life.

Once, when he was only seven years old and happily ignorant that he could bring dead things back to life, the worst snow storm in decades hit Couer d' Cours. Although Chuck lived only eighty-two steps from his house (Ned had counted every each of them without really knowing what have pushed him to do it), Chuck's father let her sleep at Ned's home.

And that was the first and only time they shared a bed—his bed, to be more exact. Even now, Ned remembered how he hadn't slept at all that night. It was impossible because she monopolized all the covers, with her breathing against his hair and with every particle of the air in the room, including his pillow, smelling like Chuck. So Ned didn't move at all during the night, not even a muscle, secretly sure that if he moved and touched her even accidentally, she would faint under the covers, leaving him alone in that narrow bed.

Now, twenty years later, Ned would have laughed at the premonition and irony of that long ago and snowy night if the not-touching-her thing didn't hurt him so much and so deeply, every second.

After that faraway night, half-consciously and half-unconsciously, Ned never had slept a whole night with anyone else. There have been girlfriends — or girlfriend, in the singular actually — but he never could stay a whole night in her bed, secretly knowing, and feeling devious and strangely guilty about knowing it, that he would be more than able to sleep at home.

That's why the first time he saw Chuck peacefully sleeping on his couch, the Pie-Maker knew that he was in love, and that he had loved her since that summer evening so long ago when he first met her.

But that was also the first time that the weight of those simple and clear rules fell upon him, breaking his bones and his heart. The very first time that he remembered having thought: "_Not touching her hurts."_

Ned discovered the second night that she slept in his home that Chuck loved watching old Audrey Hepburn movies, in particular _Breakfast at Tiffany's_, but she always fell asleep on the couch, with the volume turned down, before the ending. Ned couldn't help wondering if she knew what happened to poor Holly in the end.

That night he'd fallen asleep with his tie and everything else on in his bed and woken up to find that Chuck wasn't in her bed yet. The faint brightness of the TV screen bathed the living room with gray and bluish light, altering the limits of everything in the room, including one very asleep Charlotte Charles.

She was breathing calmly and although she was deeply asleep, her eyes weren't entirely closed, in the way some cats do. He didn't know that about her, so Ned added it to his mental list of the-little-things-that-made-Charlotte-Charles-almost-too-perfect-to-be-real.

Her legs were stretched out on the couch and one of her small hands was underneath her head. The first two buttons of her duckling pajamas were accidentally unbuttoned, or at least, Ned wanted to think with all his strength that it was an accident, that she hadn't unbuttoned them on purpose. And thinking, that in the hypothetical case that he would wake up at 3 a.m. and get up of his bed to look for her, he would see her collarbone skin and a bit of her white lace bra underneath the suddenly-now-much-less innocent duckling pajamas.

Of course, if they wouldn't have been them, or at least them without those simple and clear rules, Ned would have already taken her in his arms and carried her to _their_ bed, and by now he would be already kissing and licking her neck and her collarbone warm skin and feeling dizzy with her strawberry scent…

Ned bit his lower lip in his frustrating, attractive and —above all — typical way of his. Doing the only rational and prudent thing to do in that circumstance, he took the checked blanket on the sofa and bent slowly to cover Chuck with it.

But the Pie-Maker was so busy trying not to touch her, that he didn't noticed that Chuck was finally awake until he felt something stretching his tie and keeping him dangerously only a very few centimeters of her. Ned looked down startled to discover that she was holding it and smiling at him:

"…What are you doing?"

There was a small teasing tone in her sleepy voice and Ned could felt the little blood that remained in his brain leaving it fast. So he stammered, in a guilty tone and too close to her to be safe.

"Me…? No…nothing."

Ned could smell her honey scent everywhere and her warm breath on his face when she whispered:

"Did the TV wake you up? It wasn't my intention."

But her tone sounded absolutely as if it was, actually, her intention.

"No… I just…"

Ned didn't know how to continue the sentence but Chuck didn't seem to notice, because she let loose of his tie finally and he took a few quick and awkward steps back until the distance between them became safe and painful enough again. Ned watched how she got up slowly off the couch, turned off the TV and walked to their bedroom.

He looked at her, mesmerized by her moves, still infected with their previous proximity and asked, in the least pathetic way that he could, and trying in vain not to think of those two small buttons still unbuttoned, where he still could see her skin underneath:

"You…you don't want to see the end of the movie?"

She turned slowly in the threshold of their bedroom and looked back at him with a small teasing smile in her lips.

"No… I'll see it tomorrow night. If I don't fall asleep too…"

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Two:

The Pie-Maker didn't like surprises. For him, surprises always equaled something bad, something like: _"Surprise! Now that you have touched your mum twice, she is dead, again, forever"_ kind of thing.

So during his whole life he had avoided surprises the best he could; actually, when surprise entered his door, Ned used to wait in silence in a corner waiting for surprise to get bored of his boring life and go away to wherever it had come from.

Of course, except Chuck.

She had been a surprise since the very first second her eyes opened at his touch in her coffin.

And more than a month after that evening, the Pie-Maker discovered that he was in love and that he had lost the count of how many times he had discovered that already.

It had been some days before Halloween. The autumn had left them the very last days of sun with that characteristic golden and warm light of the fall sun, spilling everywhere and on everyone, intensely coating all the familiar and grey things of his life with a particular and almost magical amber shine. So much so that Ned found himself a bit dizzy and confused all during that week, as if he couldn't recognize the world without all his familiar grey tones and shadows.

Because light was something relatively new for the Pie-Maker.

Fridays had always been his favorite day; there wasn't a real reason to that and he didn't really know why it was. Ned couldn't help to think that it had something or everything to do with that fact that, as a little boy, Friday evenings were when Chuck and he used to play in his backyard. Then they'd eat his mother's still warm blueberry pies until their mouths, their lips and their fingers turned dark purple. Satiated from sugar and berries, they'd lie down in the backyard grass, side by side, to watch the intense blue autumn sky turn black and full of stars.

During all the years he had spent without her, Fridays always had reminded Ned of the bitter-sweet taste of blueberry pie in his mouth and her calm breathing next to him in his far, far away backyard.

The Friday of that golden and sunny autumn week, the light was finally fading slowly at sundown when the last customer left the Pie Hole with a bell clink. Chuck had gotten the habit of putting old jazz and swing records on a ramshackle record player that she had found somewhere a few days ago, and now warm and suggestive notes flooded magically in every corner of the Pie Hole.

Ned didn't like jazz or swing especially; obviously he wasn't the kind of person who could enjoy the chaos and soft savagery of those hot and dramatic notes. But that Friday, when he locked the door after the last customer and walked to his kitchen, the Pie-Maker stopped suddenly at the doorsill and forgot to breathe as he looked mesmerized into the kitchen.

The last rays of golden autumn sun shone even more intensely with the oranges of sundown, lighting without mercy every dark and grey spot of his familiar and grey kitchen. The old and warm music notes were slipping invisibly through the air, and Chuck was dancing and singing to herself gracefully, delicately and totally absorbed, while she cleaned something under the tap water.

Ned didn't remember seeing anything like that before. Of course Chuck was beautiful, that wasn't exactly fresh news for him, but he never had realized before that sundown that she was so perfect it could make him dizzy; because Charlotte Charles was a lot like looking directly to the sun.

And that hot autumn evening, while he was mesmerized with Chuck dancing alone in that empty kitchen illuminated by the orangey sunlight and surrounded by old and warm notes, the Pie-Maker knew exactly what real happiness was.

He stayed there in silence for some minutes more, hoping that she wouldn't notice him and that his heart wouldn't do too much noise when it fell down on the green tiles floor.

The red fabric of her dress tightened her soft curves while she continued moving gracefully to the rhythm of those warm notes that seemed to have taken possession of everything in the kitchen. Ned, half sheltered, half mesmerized behind the wall that separated the bar from the kitchen, looked at her, trying with all his strength to think about anything but sitting her on the worktop, spattered by flour, and kissing her while his hands, underneath her skirt, rose slowly across her thigh… and the Pie-Maker didn't even want to start thinking about those cream-colored lace panties that he'd accidentally seen in the dryer some days ago.

But he did anyway.

Ned bit his lower lip, mortified, and saw the sun slipping its orangey light on her loose hair and her pale skin in that kitchen full of warm notes, and the Pie-Maker couldn't help to think almost twenty years after than the very first time he'd thought it: _"She is not beautiful, she is… perfect." _

Still following the slow rhythm, Chuck took something from the metallic soaked colander on the counter and ate it as she continued her solitary dance in the sun-bathed kitchen; Ned looked at her for a few more seconds, until his throat seemed dryer than usually and all the blood left his brain, so the all-over-again-in-love Pie-Maker walked noiselessly and softly into the orangey kitchen at the precise moment Charlotte Charles turned, guided by the music, just in time for her small hand to crush against his shoulder.

"Oh my… I didn't hear you come in."

Her face changed from surprise to a bright smile in less than a second and she looked at him with her loose hair, still tousled and her breathing rushed by the dancing, as if she had not been about to die only a few seconds ago.

Ned cleared his throat and spoke, gently and a bit guilty:

"Sorry… My fault."

Chuck, with her hand still dangerously on his sleeve, looked at him as if she didn't hear him at all, as if the only thing that she could hear were the soft notes floating in the warm kitchen.

Ned smiled lightly and tried not to think about the warmth of her touch through the black fabric of his shirt or about the mixture of pure terror, heat and love he was feeling. "_And all that, only by her touch through the fabric, how would be to…"_

But Ned didn't want to torture himself more than usual, and besides, Chuck was looking teasingly at him as if she could read what he was thinking at that very precise moment. In fact, she looked confidently at her hand on his shoulder and then looked at him again with a hopeful and dangerous shine behind her eyes.

But Ned spoke in a hush and almost painful tone:

"You, you shouldn't do that. …We shouldn't."

Chuck nodded slowly and brushed her hand slowly, leaving a faint trace of warmth on Ned's skin underneath the black fabric. She smiled slightly and looked at him in silence but still with a small smile dancing in her lips.

"So… what were you doing?"

Ned's warm voice mixed with the notes around them and Chuck smiled radiantly before looking at him with an accomplice-like spark in her eyes, and then she walked, still smiling, to the counter.

"Oh, I was… practicing Blueberry pie."

Chuck smiled brightly and looked at him in that way that always made Ned feel dangerously happy, as if he was living somebody else life instead of his. So the Pie-Maker smiled shyly at her and spoke warmly in that suddenly very magical kitchen:

"Blueberry…?"

Charlotte Charles smiled at him, opened her big greenish eyes even wider and nodded.

"Of course… It's Friday."

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Three:

Ned had never been a jealous man.

Until Chuck.

Maybe it was because he'd never anyone as bright and beautiful in his life as Charlotte Charles. Whatever the reason, jealousy was something painfully new to the Pie-Maker.

He tried in vain not to lose his mind every time another man looked at her, wondering, same as him, if she was really wearing a diminutive dress underneath the half-buttoned coat that left the skin of her neck and collarbone exposed. The thought of Chuck naked underneath her coat always blew away his common sense embarrassingly fast, although Ned had seen her naked hundred of times by now, had almost touched her skin under the very same white gloves he used to use to handle the resurrected peaches for his pies and heard Chuck moaning his name at his gloved touch.

Although with all that and everything else they shared, the far and misshapen idea of some other man giving her everything he would never be able to give her, or doing to her all the delightful things that he would never do to her, made Ned feel sad, mad, worried and, yes, painfully alive.

Chuck was his, in every sense that really meant anything. They shared an invisible bond and every cell of her body that he couldn't touch, kiss or lick was his. Ned didn't have any doubts about that. But sometimes, when a male customer smiled at her a little longer than was polite, Ned couldn't help remembering that he was the only man in the whole world who couldn't touch her.

And that is exactly how the Pie-Maker felt when he saw, from behind the bar, the man sitting alone in the table three, smiling at her, talking to her cheerfully and looking at Chuck in her red dress, the slice of apple pie on his plate suddenly forgotten.

During the next fifteen minutes, Ned fixed all his attention on that man, so much, that he snarled and nodded deafly at something that Olive said without even looking at her, and didn't even heard the noise of her heels going away, sorrowful. Ned only could feel his blood getting thicker and darker in his veins and that little meddling voice in his mind: "_Why you didn't go find her while she was still alive?"_

That evening at closing time, instead of the sound of Chuck's laugh intoxicating him or her light illuminating without mercy everything in the kitchen, Ned felt same as his first date with Heidi Hollson, back when he was nineteen: heated, silly and out of place.

Chuck still fluttered around in the kitchen, when Olive screamed a "See you tomorrow" from the door and closed it behind her. Chuck's smile faded as soon as she stared again, concerned and suspicious at him, only to discover that Ned wasn't looking at her, or smiling at her, or smiling to himself thinking of her, like he usually did.

No.

He was busy, paying obsessive attention to the dough in the tin, and Chuck, who was peeling peaches in the counter behind him, left the peach she had in her hands half peeled on the wooden surface and turned in silence to look at him. She studied Ned for some seconds, the way his hands were moving thoroughly and precisely on everything on the counter until he finally found the flour. God, she loved those hands even if they needed to wear gloves every time they were close, inside or on her; his wide back, his long legs…

Looking at him, and especially_ thinking_ of him, Chuck felt a familiar warm vertigo in her stomach and spoke with a teasing tone, hoping that it would coat her trembling voice and her suddenly burning cheeks:

"You know, it is just flour and yeast… you don't have to watch it that exhaustively. It's not going to run away."

Ned didn't turn to look at her; he continued making small cuts to the dough in the tin as if he was alone.

"Hey… What's wrong?"

He didn't answer, he didn't even turn to her, so Chuck studied at him in silence for some seconds more, knowing that he was upset and that it was, in some mysterious way, her fault.

Chuck turned again, in silence and disappointment, to the peaches and continued peeling them. Her mind, without her permission, was in the faintly illuminated long corridor of her former house with the sound of her aunts' voices rising from downstairs and far away from that kitchen. Then she felt the unmistakable warmth radiating off a body at her back and two strong hands on her hips, through the red fabric of her dress.

"Don't turn."

Ned's very hushed, very near and very hot words whispered into her ear were more than enough to distract her from the fact the he hadn't said his habitual "_please_" at the end of the sentence.

The Pie-Maker felt how the girl named Chuck didn't move a muscle at his demanding tone or his ungloved touch; she only stood still, with her back to him and with a trickling resurrected peach trembling slightly in her hands. Ned forgot to breathe as Charlotte Charles closed her eyes unconsciously at his touch and exhaled a faint sigh in the suddenly-too-hot kitchen.

"_Secondtouchdeadsecondtouchdeadsecondtouchdead…"_

That was the only thing he could awkwardly think about when he sensed Chuck's heart racing fast while his naked hands pressed her, needy and homicidal, against him.

"_God… she is really alive. Too much alive for you."_

With her unspoken oath to stay immobile, trapped against the counter and his body so neither of them would die that evening, Ned slid his bare hands along the thin fabric of her dress, touching possessively her hips, her waist, her stomach and everything else in their way. Chuck drop the half-peeled and wet peach from her hands and licked her lips involuntarily, feeling his body dangerously close at her back.

Ned wasn't speaking; there were no stutters or stammers this time, he didn't say a word, he just needed to touch her for "real," just for once. The Pie-Maker closed his eyes slowly, caressing Chuck's warm body between his hands, imagining the pale skin underneath her dress.

And when he found himself trying to catch the strawberry scent of her hair in spite of knowing that just a few inches more closer would be the death of her, and surely for him, Ned admitted to himself that he was somehow trying to fulfill that very small, very insignificant and yet very painful part of their relationship, the one and only thing that unlike every other man on earth, he couldn't give her. And it wasn't only the sex, or at least, sex in the way everybody else understood it.

No, it was the sickly need of Chuck he had developed during all these months. He was a Chuck-oholic and it drove him insane, blurring idea of losing her.

Because truth was, the Pie-Maker lived terrified and haunted by the idea that someday she would grow tired of living their two-beds, gloves and plastic wrap life, and would fly away from him.

"Ned… it's okay.

I'm not going anywhere."

Her voice sounded faint but amazingly determined and although he couldn't see her face, Ned was sure she had spoken with her beautiful eyes still closed.

"You promise?"

Ned's voice sounded as if he was that eight-year-old boy again, hoarse and fragile, and so close that Charlotte Charles trembled imperceptibly when he straightened his grip and when she felt his warm breath moving her loose hair.

"Yes.

I promise."

Ned smiled slightly and let out a soft sigh, feeling happy, dizzy, jealous and mad, all at once, and passed his hands slowly on her again, more shy and gently this time, more like Ned.

Chuck turned slowly and carefully, still between his hands, to look at him.

"I… I…"

Ned's stammer that she loved so much came back to him and flooded the kitchen.

Then, the Pie-Maker looked down, smiling shyly, mortified at his hands still on her hips. Even so, he took some seconds before brushing them away, putting them together at his back, like he always did when she was around.

"…Sorry."

Ned couldn't help to look at her in the way that he always looked at her, as if after twenty years without her, she has just woken up in her coffin at his touch again.

Chuck smiled brightly and looked at him, making the Pie-Maker feeling dangerously normal, then she took a few steps towards the door, still smiling happily, and turned in the threshold when she noticed that Ned wasn't following her.

"C'mon… Let's go home."

The Pie-Maker smiled, relieved, amazed and a hundred things more, and walked slowly toward Chuck, who was still in the doorsill, looking at him with a radiant and one hundred percent Charlotte Charles smile in her lips. With a warm and mischievous tone in her soft voice, she added:

"And don't forget the gloves…"

The end.

Comments are love.


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